


this black and white photo can't capture my skin

by voodoochild



Category: The Hour
Genre: Aftermath, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Backstory, Bisexual Female Character, Character Study, Discussion of Abortion, F/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Spanish Civil War, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-08
Updated: 2013-12-08
Packaged: 2018-01-04 01:08:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1075262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voodoochild/pseuds/voodoochild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The transformation of Margaret Tunstall, posh girl from Surrey, into the hard-drinking, hard-living, journalistic legend that is Lix Storm, birth to death. You can't tell this story in just a few snapshots.</p>
            </blockquote>





	this black and white photo can't capture my skin

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MmeBahorel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MmeBahorel/gifts).



> Notes: All of my Spanish Civil War knowledge comes from the internet. Please forgive any errors, but I have tried to be as faithful to the timeline of the war as possible. The incident in Brunete where a journalist is killed driving a car away from the front lines is from Gerda Taro's life, and thieved for Lix purposes (as I'm pretty sure Gerda was one of Abi Morgan's inspirations for Lix). Title from "The War Was in Color" by Carbon Leaf. Love to E and P for the beta.

You were born in Surrey, and you swore to yourself you wouldn't die there.

You're going to have adventures, be something more than some man's possession. You pick at your nails during dinner and put runs in your stockings during Mother's garden parties, wishing you could be upstairs in your room reading Melville or Kipling, or the dime novels your cousin Bebe slips you every Sunday. You've been escorted home by the police too many times to count for sneaking into veterans' clubs and taking photos of the soldiers. 

You couldn't help it. There were dozens of men - heroes, you called them, but that was when you were too young to ever comprehend war - and the way they sit, the way they drink, the way they smoke and stare off into the horizon just fascinates you. You never knew you were looking at yourself, thirty years later.

Father's begun to despair of ever marrying you off to anyone suitable. 

You won't break his heart - he dies in '37, and believes that his eldest daughter has run away to Spain with a journalist, not to _be_ one.

***

Boarding school is actually a godsend, away from Mother's ambition and Father's expectations and Trudy's jealousy (because _whyever do you pay such attention to Meg, Mummy, she's such a disappointment_ ). You teach yourself to drink and smoke, to use it as the shield that will be all you cling to in Spain. You learn to stop hating the way you look (too-tall, too-round, nose too big) and learn to use it to your advantage. 

Soused punters don't try to grope girls who could break them over their knee, and nice men don't trap girls who keep cigarettes behind their ear in marriage. You're too feminine to overlook, too mannish to accept, and you leave men in your wake like a force of nature.

And the other girls? Well, you like them quite a bit. You're tough, mysterious, and the one they all go to to "practice" snogging. It's not practice for you, after all. Girls, boys - they're all opportunities.

But you get careless. There is an ill-advised liaison with one of the Saint Catherine's teachers. There are consequences manifesting in morning sickness and a thickening waist. Tongues wag, the headmaster is called, and your parents are given the option to remove you to the country house before the truth is revealed. You ring Bebe in a panic and bless her, she has a better idea.

The termination doesn't hurt when you're too drunk to see straight.

You can't face Mother or Father or Trudy, and now that Saint Catherine's knows the extent of your behavior you're likely to be sent down. London is a new start, working for a friend of Bebe's as a pub waitress. You can drink the clientele under the table and slap any tossers who grope you. There is a writer who comes into the pub every week, and after nicking some of your shots of the veterans' home, he soon proclaims you have some skill as a photographer. He gets your your first Guardian byline, and asks you what you want your credit to be.

Margaret Alexandra Tunstall isn't a photojournalist.

Alexis Storm might be.

***

Running away to Spain isn't reinvention.

It's rebirth.

A new job, a new purpose. A new language to shape your mouth around -not by rote, but organically, because _altro cerveza por favor_ is more important than _hola, como estas?_. A new look, hair chopped off and trousers fitted to your hips. You left dresses behind in Surrey, awkward pieces of fabric that always left you feeling exposed. New family, _fotographos_ in rough cotton and denim, nearly indistinguishable from the _militianos_ save their cameras. 

You have a new name to call your own, one with no history and no expectations except that "Alexis" is a curiously feminine man, or a staggeringly unorthodox woman.

You step off the train in Madrid, and it's heat and dust and sound, so far from the dullness of England. Jerry Burnside picks you up, and he'll spend the next year being the best contact you ever made. He's been in Spain since the '20s, watched the tensions rise and the generals plot, got word out to France and England of Sotelo's execution. He's with the _Confederacion Nacionale del Trabajo_ , and it's barely two hours on the ground before he brings you to your first demonstration.

You could never have known what you were witnessing. Twenty-six year old Surrey girl, and you thought you'd prepared for this. 

You'd covered the dockworkers' strike in Manchester, stood on a ledge for two hours to get the shot that was your first Guardian front page. You'd broken the gas explosion in Wrexham, watched over two hundred men injured or killed. You'd interviewed men from the Hunger March, still covered in bruises and nearing exhaustion. Been to Turkey, to India, to Morocco and seen things; thought you knew the depths to which humanity could sink.

You didn't know a goddamned thing.

Clothes torn in the mob, shoved and kicked and only kept upright by the grace of the mountainous Welshman next to you. Not standing and watching the protest, but swept up in it, _OBRER! CAMPEROL! UNITAT PER LA VICTORIA!_ ringing in your ears. Seeing that first shot ring out from the Falanga, men and women and children cut down not two feet in front of you. Shops looted and burned, bodies piling in the streets - you used up all the film you had and still wished for more.

You decided _this_ was the story you wanted to tell, these were the people who needed to be seen. You holed up with the CNT for months, got an exclusive with the The Morning Star to send back dispatches, burned through the days on film and propaganda and the nights on whiskey and sex. 

It's a lonely existence, but it's yours.

***

It's in a bombed-out factory in Seville that you meet the man who will change your life. 

You didn't want to leave Madrid, but the CNT has been effectively disbanded by the government. It was Jerry's idea to go to Seville, set up in a government stronghold to try and rally the people, and it was Jerry's idea to stand toe-to-toe with de Llano's forces. You watched the dozen or so bullets tear through him, watched the rest of the CNT be cut down, men you drank with and women you laughed with, and you ran blindly to the first building you could find. 

For the first time, your hands were shaking too hard to focus your camera.

Years later, you cursed yourself for cowardice; you should have been there to witness the rioting, the killing, the blood running through the Plaza del Zurradores. Nothing happened that day that hadn't happened hundreds of times before, and yet all you could see behind your eyes was the gunshot, the spurt of blood out of Jerry's head. So you ran.

No one's going to be looking for a too-tall British photojournalist in the still-smoking ruins of a factory. The sodding air-raid sirens are still going, and underneath, the click of heels on concrete. You've drawn your rifle before you see - or care - who it is.

_"Basta! Quien es?"_

The man's Spanish is halting, broken, and his body stills, trying desperately to relax into a posture that doesn't scream "military". You still can't see his face, but he has a revolver in his hand.

_"Soy un periodista. No - no te lastimare."_

You step out from underneath the collapsed assembly line, keeping the rifle leveled at the man's chest. He's quite tall, and skinny enough for his elbows to show through the patched sleeves of his jacket. His hair is ridiculous, but there's something you find fascinating about his posture, the quirk of his mouth.

_"Ingles? Frances? Ruso?"_

_"Ingles._ Scotland, actually."

You have to laugh, lowering the rifle. 

"Dear god in heaven, man, I think that's the worst attempt at Spanish I've ever heard."

He turns around, eyes widening behind his glasses in surprise. You're used to the reactions your appearance and natural accent get, but this goes beyond curiosity and into a sort of irritated scrutiny. Under his gaze, you feel your skin alight, and it's been so fucking long since you've felt an honest stab of arousal (instead of the desperate, drunken, fumbling that goes on in a barracks) that you feel yourself smile. 

His name is Randall Brown, he officially works for the Herald but has been providing Ce Soir with their headlines for the past year, and he tells you he wants to offer you a job.

***

Seville is where your working relationship starts. Randall's words and your images, putting together dispatches in a run-down little hotel, his pacing across the floorboards trying to find the right phrase, your controlled-chaos of a darkroom to develop shots you waited a lifetime to get. You both share the restless itch to drown out the war in whisky, the burn of it overpowering the gunpowder and blood. 

You sleep in a bed for the first time in months, though it isn't his yet. You learn that he is brilliant and a bit mad - for how else to describe his meticulous organization and repetitive motions? - but that in his way, he's as broken as you've been.

Because there are nights you don't speak of, nights your sobbing echoes down the hall, nights he loses the battle against his demons and there is broken glass all over his floor. There is the way that he goes still and silent when machine-gun fire echoes, the way that you cannot bear to photograph the church lootings. 

There are no strangers in war, no comfortable reserve to retreat to. You learn to identify his bad days and his good days, and he learns yours in return. You fight like hellcats, shout the walls down over his fascist sympathies and your socialist views, but you've got to admit, the fights are wonderful for your copy. His apologies come in a tin of chocolate, yours in rubbing tired shoulders, and you wonder how long you'd have lasted back in Madrid.

The pair of you break story after story to the British and French papers. The bombing of Guernica. Hedilla's court-martial. Bilbao and _El Cinturón de Hierro_. You want to jump in a truck and go, see the battles and the aftermath and the dying for yourself, but he reins you in. He's good at that, at managing people. He tells you there are stories here, and there are, but they're not like the burn of the front lines.

Meanwhile, you'd honestly kill for _one day_ without the air raid sirens. Your ears ring constantly - you'll spend most of the early forties in the same state - and your stomach drops every time the buildings shake from impact. Randall insists you keep your head down. Trench warfare, he explains, operates largely on the same principle, and he won't let you run off to the front without preparation. His hand spans your neck, resting heavy and solid against your skin.

It doesn't make you feel any safer, but for years afterward, in every bombing you survive, you'll feel the ghost of his hand.

***

July brings a telegram that neither of you can ignore.

_Brunete under siege, captured by Lister. Condor Legion en route. German neutrality at an end._

You're ready to leave immediately, of course. The Northern Front is where the action is, where the _loyales_ are attempting to break the siege of Madrid and the _nacionales_ have blockaded most of the ports in retaliation. Your mind is racing, trying to come up with ways to convince Randall that this is where you need to be, and you don't notice how motionless he's gone.

He's still staring at the telegram.

"What is it? What's wrong?"

His voice rolls out like distant thunder; you've never heard him so angry. You won't again, not until October and Gijon, but that is months from now.

"Germany. Germany has joined the war. For the nationalists."

You know a little of what he'd been before Spain. An infantryman in the British Army during the Great War, took a bullet and bled out over most of France. An angry young man who'd joined up for duty and honor (but most of all, for escape), who'd read Marinetti and Proudhon and believed in a purer democracy. You understand that. You'll never understand how such an intelligent man could have once sympathized with an organization like the Falanga, who subdue and butcher instead of govern.

He does not lose his composure, taking out a cigarette and lighting it, then setting the telegram alight as well. He drops it to the dirt floor, watching it burn to ashes. You understand.

"If we take the train, we can be there before dawn tomorrow."

"We're going. Pack everything up, everything you can carry. Essentials only. We have a battle to cover."

There is a burn to his gaze, a fine tension settling into his shoulders. There is purpose in his manner and a passion to match your own. This is not a man that you've ever seen before, not through all the fighting and bloodshed. This man will not rein you in, will not tell you "no, stop". He will not justify noninterference any longer, and you cannot take your eyes off him.

(You'll remember this day, this campaign, as when you fell in love with Randall Brown. You'll never quite be able to forgive yourself, but you'll also never bring yourself to regret it.)

***

You step off another train, this time in Brunete, and again, you think you're prepared.

You know the way the mud and damp and blood seeps into everything, all the scrubbing in the world won't get it out. You know the howl of gunfire and air raid sirens. You know the stench of the battlefield, go to sleep with it and wake up with it every day. You've done it since Madrid, why should this be any different?

You're still dead wrong. 

Brunete is on the front lines, and you can't prepare yourself for that. Bodies piling up, blood turning the ground red, attacks around the clock. You remember the soldiers you used to photograph as a child, and it's only when you catch sight of your reflection that you realize you're one of them. You learn to sleep standing up, because the men who come in the night to rob the dead will do worse to a live woman. You've carried the rifle since Madrid, but this is the first time you've stood shoulder to shoulder with the _milicianas_ and shot men for the simple act of crossing a line. Sometimes your hands shake too much to clean it, and it's then that Randall reaches over, his hands rock-steady as he methodically takes the rifle apart and puts it back together.

He worries about you, which is all right because you worry about him. While you're patrolling with the _milicianas_ , he's in the trenches and up in the towers. It seems he hasn't forgotten how to take a sniper perch, how to spot incursions, but sometimes he forgets which war he's fighting. His hands don't shake when he holds a gun, or you.

Sometimes you don't remember when you first slept with Randall. You remember July, joining up with the _internacionales_ because they were losing entire battalions by the day. You remember curling up together in the tent because even honorable men lost their honor with an unattached woman around - better Randall than someone else. You remember sweat rolling down your bodies and the way Randall's arm would curl around you in his sleep and him nicking a dead Franquista's rucksack because you'd wanted soap and cigarettes. 

And you remember the nights. The days blur together, but the nights have never dimmed in nineteen years. Hands over each other's mouths, pushing back cries of passion. Randall's mouth mapping every inch of your body. The way he would swear when you put your nails to his back. Prodding him, goading him, to lose his temper and fuck you hard enough to bruise. Days at a time when neither of you could sleep, so you drowned the world in whiskey and sex.

But you both walk around with this untouchable air, and the universe must not like that. The Republican retreat changes everything.

Randall tells you when you wake up that you were driving a car of wounded soldiers away from the fighting. The Captain had told you to go, and Randall had been up on a sniper perch, picking off anyone trying to shoot the fleeing Republicans. Your car had been hit by a tank, and two soldiers and a woman had died. He'd thought it was you when he first heard.

You're lucky to have escaped with only a concussion and a fractured wrist. Randall decides that you both need a new start, a new city, away from the front lines, where he'll go mad and you'll get yourself killed.

You'll never forgive him for choosing Gijon.

***

Gijon changes you both, because there's nothing to disguise the truth. Your lives are endless death and destruction, body count rising every day, drinking because there's nothing else to do to keep sane. Randall writes like a madman and you use up nearly all your film on the endless suffering. You learn his body's limits better than your own, and he does the same in return. He isn't above letting you drink yourself into a stupor to sleep, and you don't flinch from provoking a fight just to get him to let out the anger.

You never, ever tell him you love him. Nor does he tell you. Because it's not love, it's desperation. It's necessity. 

(Forty years later, you'll be working on the _Kreditbanken_ story, and realize it was fucking Stockholm Syndrome.)

It's broken glass on your floor and Randall's skinned knuckles from punching walls. It's you mocking his tics, his fussing over the tea service he drags everywhere and his constant straightening of his tie. It's him scoffing at your flirting with the militianas and calling you a slut, ignoring his own infidelities. It's shoving every betrayal into each other's faces, trying desperately to prove you don't need each other.

Except you do. You need him and he needs you, and you both always end up back in whatever shitty room you've holed up in this week, fucking out of sheer desperation because it never feels like anything unless you're together. Breathing for each other, bodies the only solid thing left in a city that's going to fall to the Franquistas.

You'll look back in years to come and be able to pinpoint the exact night of your daughter's conception; October, during an all-night air raid. 

You remember running from building to building, trying to find shelter that wouldn't fall on your heads. There was a huge explosion as a shell hit a gas tank, and you ran up to the roof of a clothing shop to get the perfect shot of the burning wreck, planes in the background. A front-cover shot, something that would impact civilians, and you suppose it was a risk, but you got up and down without being hurt.

Randall had been terrified that you were going to be hit; he hadn't even been able to speak, just pulled you into the wreckage of the shop because the planes don't bomb destroyed targets, and wrapped you in his arms. Touched you like a man possessed, every inch of your skin mapped and tasted, and neither of you had thought of things like rubbers or pulling out before he came. You'd at least made an effort of it, before.

Gijon falls two days later. A week after that, you and Randall follow the Republicans south to Zaragoza, and a few weeks after that, Teruel. You find a decent hotel, because Teruel is playing host to visiting celebrities and journalists are most welcome, and you don't mind having running water if it means playing nice with the rookie reporters.

It's during the worst Spanish winter in decades, wrapped in every blanket you own and Randall's woolen coat, that you first notice the swelling of your stomach.

***

You don't tell him a thing. You only gain a little weight, easy to pass off as being able to eat regular meals and not marching all over Aragon, and the morning sickness isn't difficult to hide when he rises three hours before you do and is usually off chasing down soldiers for news of the front.

You don't think of it as lying or hiding. You still haven't decided what to do - you refuse to raise a child in a war zone, you won't go back to England an unwed mother, and you won't marry him, even if he did ask. It's not too late to drink pennyroyal tea, bleed out a little more at the end of the month, but every time you consider it, your stomach turns in distaste. You've already terminated one child, two might be tempting fate. 

Nothing changes between the two of you; he's still odd and angry, you're still headstrong and eager. If you're jumpier or more snappish with him than usual, he doesn't comment on it. It's bloody cold out, after all, temperatures below freezing every day, nights even worse, snow blanketing everything. Having the excuse to curl up with him when you've been crying all morning isn't terrible, nor is the excuse of wearing layers all the time. 

You only speak of the future once. It's a bitterly cold morning, and he hasn't quite managed to get out of bed yet, huddled under the blankets with his arms around your waist and his head resting on your shoulder. 

"Would you go back to London - when all this is over?"

"With you?"

"Yes, with me. We could live somewhere decent, Chelsea or Islington. Probably a step down from your usual types of addresses, but-"

"I lived in Shoreditch before I came here, Randall."

"... you haven't answered my question."

"I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, let alone in some possible future where we've survived this war. Let's not . . . just stay here with me now, all right?"

He'd acquiesced, kissing your shoulder and curling into you to doze off again. You hadn't been able to sleep, nausea and vague fear keeping you frozen in place. Did you really think you'd both survive? That you could keep the child, be a family with him? 

The telegram comes in late February, when you're four months' gone, and it makes your decision for you: Teruel is firmly in Nationalist hands, Randall's being reassigned to the Aragon front, and you're to head for Barcelona. 

You don't tell him - it's bad enough you're being separated. He swears to come to Barcelona as soon as he can, swears he'll find you and that you'll be together again. If he'd known about the child, he would have done something stupid, put all of you in danger. He leaves on a cold, grey March morning, and you pack for Barcelona, promising that you won't cry over him. You do it anyway, lying in the bed that still smells of him, clinging to a pillow and unable to stop cradling your stomach. 

This is what you have left of him - an empty bed, a telegram, and a child that you don't even know if you'll keep. 

***

Eight days after you arrive in Barcelona, the offensive begins. The Italians begin bombing the city, purely to terrify civilians, and the Spanish even turn off the air raid sirens because no one knows if the raid's beginning or ending. Three days and nights, it goes on, a constant wave of explosions, no rhyme or reason to it. No military targets, just houses and churches and schools, a cinema blown to bits by a direct hit, 300 people inside. The Italians are even using delayed-fuse bombs, dropping them inside buildings to explode five minutes later when the air raid's believed to be over. 

This is before the Blitz, before fifty-seven consecutive nights of bombing that you'll survive on a cocktail of adrenaline, instinct, pep pills, and all the alcohol you can drink. This is before anyone has the slightest conception of total warfare, of targeted attacks against a populace.

It'll make you sick in later years, but Barcelona is where you make yourself famous. You take shots of the delayed-fuse targets, before and after, show what the Italians are capable of. You steel your stomach against the stench of blood and rotting flesh, and capture shots of the library turned field hospital, hundreds of dead and dying brought out of the rubble. You bring to light the slaughter of innocents, a child lying in the street, a mother cradling her baby, two boys shouting for their parents. 

Seventy-five hours later, you collapse into your hotel bed, shaking and crying. Not even the whisky is helping, and all you can do is apologize to the child inside of you that you haven't thought of in three days. 

Barcelona is hell, but it crystallizes in your mind what you're going to do about this baby - you're going to have it, and you're going to give it to people who are going to care for it. You can't have a child in a war zone, and you know that the front lines are where you belong.

It's strange - the moment your decision settles on you, the morning sickness nearly evaporates. You start eating more, gaining weight, eventually feeling the child move and kick. You catch glimpses of your changed body in the mirror each morning, and you wonder what Randall would have thought of it. Would he have cherished the sight of his child inside you, or been disgusted at the difference? 

Sometimes you're firmly convinced of the latter, because the changes in your body start affecting your work. You can't run to catch that perfect shot anymore, can't throw yourself into the crowds during riots and demonstrations and battles. Staying in the background, in the safe zones, is what you must do now, and you hate it. Sometimes you think you'll never experience anything more awful.

And then you give birth, and you're damned sure that giving birth is the most godawful thing in the world and that you won't be doing it again. 

It takes eight and a half hours, nearly a bottle of whiskey, and a lot of screaming, but your daughter is healthy and beautiful when the cook-turned-midwife of the town places her in your arms. You can't help but see Randall in her, his eyes, his mouth, and you wish, for a moment, that he could see her. You name her Sophia, for a poem you once read together, and even though you know you won't keep her, you know you'll kill anyone who even goes near her.

No one bats an eye when you register her as Sophia Tunstall, and you can't help but feel a tiny thrill at the scandal Mummy and Trudy would find in it. 

***

You take her to France to get away from the battlefield, even though your fingers itch for your camera and you miss the frenetic pace of wartime. Barcelona to Paris on the sleeper train, not that you actually sleep. Sophia hates the rocking, wails constantly, and you simply don't know what more to do for her (fed her, changed her, soothed her, walked her, sung to her).

The family in the berth across from you are sweet, from Portsmouth of all places, and the teenage girls are enchanted with both your camera and Sophia. The wife very calmly takes Sophia and you don't know what she does, but your daughter's asleep in moments. The husband takes in your grimy shirt, the trousers you can't remember belonged to you or Randall, and overgrown hair, and sits you down in the dining car with a large glass of whisky and a willingness to listen about Spain. 

You could cry; you haven't felt normal in years, and it's the only two nights you sleep through between Sophia's birth and leaving her with the Malfrands.

You meet them walking through the outskirts of Paris, Sophia wrapped into a makeshift sling you fashioned out of a bedsheet. The hotel will never miss it, really. Marie is a _patissiere_ , plying your stories out of you with _pain au chocolat_ and croissants and the most delicious macarons you've ever tried. Pierre is a teacher, literature and history, library full of books you hope Sophia will read one day. They take an immediate shine to Sophia, letting the two of you stay for meals, sit in their garden, listen to their radio.

The silence when you tell them you'd like to leave Sophia with them when you head out the next morning is profound. Marie never asks why you're giving up your daughter. Sitting in their garden, Sophia bright-eyed in your lap, she never needs to. Pierre, though, tries to convince you otherwise, doesn't want to feel as if he's accepting charity. 

As if a child could be a charitable donation.

You explain to him that you'll never be able to give her the life she'll have with them, never be able to raise her the way she should be raised. 

"And her father?" Pierre asks, sipping his coffee. "He doesn't have a say in the matter?"

You have to laugh, though it comes out in a sob and you bury your face in Sophia's wispy curls. 

"He doesn't know. And he won't, because you move where you're told when you're a war correspondent. He's as mad for it as I am. Christ, a child with the two of us? It wouldn't be right."

"I - we can't simply-"

"You can," you say simply, picking Sophia up and handing her to Marie. "You've tried for children for years. I never wanted them. You have a beautiful home that deserves a family. I have a hotel room in a war zone and a flat in Shoreditch. If she stays with me, one or both of us will be killed. Please don't - don't make this harder for me. Let me leave knowing she'll be safe and loved."

You wait until you're back in your hotel room to cry. You don't stop for two days.

***

It's easy to forget you ever had a daughter when you live the kind of life you live.

You go back to Spain, back to Madrid, and while you spend four agonizing months expecting to see Randall around every corner, you take some amazing photos. Real front-page work, and the BBC takes notice. They send you to Poland for the demonstrations, then Germany to document the rise of Chancellor Hitler's new administration. You're in Paris for the Nazi invasion, London for the Blitz, and you break story after story. You follow the RAF for a bit, then spend a few months on the Eastern Front freezing your tits off in Kiev. The BBC places you back in Paris for the Allied liberation, and it's amazing, you haven't felt so alive in a very long time.

Paris is where you remember you're a woman, not simply a machine fueled on photographs, coffee, and whisky. Your liaisons during the war were straightforward, a night or two, nothing lingering, and you'd forgotten what it was like to take your time. It's the first time anyone's really touched you since Randall - your broader hips, your shrapnel scars, the faint lines on your belly - and there are quite a few weekends you can't remember from those days. Men, women, sometimes both, fucking because it's easier to lose yourself that way than sit in your hotel room brooding. 

The women are young, usually. Sweet, pretty girls who are dazzled by your photographs - or simply your scandalous ways. The men are older, know what they're getting in for and have no expectations of you other than a very good time. 

1946 is a haze - sex, photographs, dispatches, wine, whisky, glittering cabarets and dark alleys - and you think you're fine. Then the BBC calls; they want you back in London to work on their radio programmes. You think you're fine, even though you spend the train ride smoking your way through two packs of cigarettes and mostly-drunk on gin.

You think you're fine until you get on the Tube for Liverpool Street. There's still damage from the Blitz, smell of scorched earth, and all you can remember is fifteen panicked hours stuck in a tube station while the air raid sirens kept going off. You've gotten on the wrong train, you're headed toward the West End instead of the East End, and you rush aboveground at Baker Street, trying to breathe.

You don't know if it's a blessing or a curse that your Great-Aunt Delia's townhouse is two streets away.

For not seeing you in eleven years, Auntie Dee is remarkably composed when you ring her doorbell and barge into her sitting room to begin to confess everything that you've done in the interim. Then again, Bedelia Warrington-Smythe ran the WRAF during the first World War and catted about London with Wilde, so nothing much shocks her. She embraces you, calling you by your given name, and you hate the sound of it so much you nearly put your fist through her wall.

"It's Lix now, Alexis if you absolutely must, but if you call me Meg, I'll do something drastic, Auntie Dee, please."

"Alexis, then," she says calmly, pouring you a cup of tea and pressing you into an overstuffed sofa. "I imagine you have some stories to tell me. Would you mind ringing your mother first? She does believe you're dead."

"No," you say, sharp and panicked. "I don't want to speak to her. Or Trudy. Or anyone except you."

"What is it you imagine they'll say, darling? That you're horrible, that you're a failure?"

If you tell your mother you had a child out of wedlock with a mad Scottish journalist while covering a war in Spain, she'll expire of embarrassment. Your sister might find it within her to be disgusted first. You can't stand them hating you - better that they consider you dead than "ruined".

And the story - all of it, school and London and Spain and Randall and Sophia and Paris - comes pouring out to Auntie Dee. By the time you're finished, the sun's set and the wall sconces have been lit by servants you don't remember seeing. You can't meet her eyes, but you hear her footsteps and feel the sofa dip beside you. You're enveloped in warm, strong arms, and expensive perfume. 

"Oh, my dear girl - you have been through the wringer, haven't you? And I know why you don't want to tell your mother and sister anything, but do you know, Edward would have been very, very proud of you. As am I."

***

After a fortifying round of Auntie Dee's best cognac, you can face the world again. She makes you swear on your Contax that you'll visit her at least once a month for the rest of your life, which you keep, even though she's more meddlesome than ten junior reporters.

You return to the BBC, and you get complacent.

Each day bleeds into the next. You sleep in your office - you say it's to be available for your stringers, 3 am calls from Morocco, but it's because you can't stand your empty flat - you drink nearly a bottle of whisky a day, and you barely have to put forth an effort to impress anyone. You coast on reputation, on the strength of photographs that hurt normal people to look at, and you fuck away the loneliness when it gets too much.

It's never been difficult to find bed partners. They have to be discreet, pretty, too young to know better, and they're not allowed to stay the night. You're hell to wake up to, anyway.

In '53, there are two new children in the editing department - because they are children, barely past twenty - that catch your eye. Freddie Lyon has passion and ambition in him you haven't seen since Seville, since Randall. Bel Rowley has brilliance and brightness and a dedication to her work you lost long ago. He challenges you to live up to your past, she reminds you to take care of yourself now, and you adore them both. 

If they're not married in five years, you'll march them down the aisle yourself.

They chafe in editing, and as soon as you're able, as soon as it becomes clear that Freddie's developing his own stories and Bel's practically running the department, you drop a word in the ear of the radio service. They come work with you, and it becomes clear they're going to change things at the BBC. 

It's barely three years later that Bel sells Douglas on The Hour, and you get another "foreign desk" credit to your name. This is in television, though, and while you can still file bulletins in your sleep, you have new challenges to tackle, namely a presenter who is so far up his own arse that he thinks he can rewrite your copy. You like Hector quite a bit, he's lovely to look at and has fantastic taste in whisky, but you could honestly throttle him half the time.

He's not your only challenge - there's a network of stringers to keep track of, the looming (and then shattering) conflict in Egypt, the ever-growing nuclear threat, MI6 and communist spies, and some days, you let yourself think that this is what you wanted. To be behind the scenes, but working on a television show, bringing immediate information to the masses. Except your fingers still itch for a camera that sits on your desk, a camera you haven't touched in ten years. 

You itch for something else you haven't had in years; let yourself fall a little for a beautiful boy in a knitted waistcoat, even though Freddie's not yours to have. 

It happens when you're weak, when he is, when the loneliness is too much to bear, because you haven't been in love in years and he cannot bear watching Bel leave him behind. You're weak enough to fuck him, hold him through the night, let him wake up next to you and let him down gently, because life is cruel enough. If you wish for longer fingers against your skin, a thinner mouth kissing yours, a sharper tongue whispering secrets into your ear, you never tell him, because he's wishing for things you aren't either.

He leaves. He travels. 

And then he comes back, and he doesn't come alone.

***

The wife - once you hear about her from a drunken, weeping Bel - isn't a surprise. Like the man you left in Spain and still see in him, Freddie is a romantic, and his wife is Continental and charming and bohemian. She doesn't have the slightest idea of what she's getting into, doesn't know the way Freddie will risk everything for a story, the deep love he has for journalism, but you know she'll land on her feet.

But before you even know Freddie's returned, you hear a voice in the corridor you haven't heard in nineteen years.

The tailspin it sends you into - seeing the changes the years have caused in him, pretending you didn't spend three years in a war zone learning his heartbeat, the way he'd tried to speak to you alone and you wouldn't permit it, wouldn't dare - it's impressive. You don't even remember leaving the building, but you close the door to your flat too hard and realize you must have. You haven't drunk an entire bottle of whisky in a matter of hours in a long time, haven't been back to your flat in just about as long. Sometimes you forget you even have a flat at all. 

(It's musty and neglected, frosted-over icebox, books tossed everywhere, newspapers in teetering piles. You don't recall hoovering this year.)

You hadn't bothered with a glass. Or much clothing. The shirt and trousers you'd worn today feel like they're holding his scent, which is idiotic, all you'd done is shake his hand cordially. Pretended you hadn't wanted to hold it to your face, your heart, feel cool skin and those architecturally-perfect fingers, that broad palm. You'd prided yourself that your voice hadn't shaken, hand stayed steady, and you'd finished the run order for tonight's show even with him standing by your desk and half-panicked nudging it back into order.

You fall asleep on the sofa, pretending you haven't been crying for the past hour, and wake up in desperate need of some paracetemol and breakfast. He always had made you eat something in the mornings.

Your coworkers know something is off - Hector, Bel, Sissy, Isaac, even Percy the boom guy all ask if you're all right, if there's a problem between you and Mr. Brown. And no, darlings, whatever do you mean? You're perfectly fine, ready to handle the copy for McMillan and Eisenhower's meeting, Hector, if you cut a single, solitary word, I will get you banned from every bar in London. Your smirk is perfect, witticisms as crafted as ever, and life goes on.

Except it doesn't, because Randall unearths the past, brings all of your sins into the light. You should have told him about Sophia, you admit that, but with every accusation he throws at you, your resolve hardens. Your daughter is best left in the past, unspoken-of, left to live her life, and if he wants to chase the story like a dog with a car, that's fine, but you can't let yourself hope too much.

Hope is all he has. Hope is what you don't want to let yourself depend on.

Because hope very rarely delivers on its promises, you've learned, and hope will fuck you over every time.

***

The day you learn your daughter is dead is the day you almost lose Freddie, and after two hours in the hospital, you can't take it anymore.

You make it to the hallway before bursting into low, harsh sobs. Iron band around your heart, grief lodged in your throat, and you're hearing things that aren't there. Phantom air-sirens like the one Sophia would have heard before she died, ambulance sirens like the one that carried Freddie here. Your hands want a camera to hold, open and close on a vast emptiness. Hector tries to steady you, hesitant, a hand to your back.

You nearly punch him.

You don't want to be touched, you don't deserve to be touched, and you never want to be touched again. Marnie tries, sweet and gentle, calling to you like you're a feral animal, and you suppose you are. The sisters are becoming alarmed, and Bel comes out of the room, tries to ask you what's wrong. There aren't enough words to even begin, you laugh bitterly and almost-hysterically, and it feels like you're going to tear open, tear apart.

"No, Miss Rowley, let her be. All of you, please give her some room."

Commanding, controlling, competent Randall. You feel your back hit the brick wall, and it feels like everything - the walls, the floor - is closing in. Randall approaches you, nothing hesitant in him because he remembers what this feels like, laces his fingers with yours. Lets you try to shove him off, rip your hands away, but you can't, you can't do anything right.

He lets you cry, won't watch you hide it away any longer, deep, ragged sobs against the familiar planes of his chest. You can't stop shaking at the feel, the smell of him, but eventually you still. He rests his head against yours the way you did for him five hours ago. Breathe in. Breathe out. It empties your head out, distills everything down to its simplest form, and you haven't been this certain about anything since Spain.

If you speak, you'll scream, and you won't stop.

You don't know what he tells Bel, Hector and Marnie. All you can focus on is his hands wrapped tightly around yours, leading you into the stairwell.

***

You're thankful for the semi-privacy, because your knees go out, and you sit on the step in front of him. He wraps his arms around you again, lets you stare out at the darkened city, try to stop crying.

"I can't -" you try to say, but he shakes his head.

"No, you can't. You can't bring her back. You can't make him better. What you can do for me is breathe."

You can't do anything but sob, let Randall fold you into his arms - and goddamn him, he's everything you promised yourself you wouldn't need anymore. Curl your nails into his suit jacket, breathe him in, try not to fly apart again. 

"I'm sorry," you manage when you have the breath. "I'm sorry I'm sorry I left you I'm sorry I left her -"

"Lix, sweetheart, don't be. I left first, not you. It's over, I don't blame you, neither of us could have known." 

You don't want his forgiveness, but you might need it. He strokes at your hair, presses his lips to your temple, your forehead, the way he used to. You want so badly to kiss him properly, but not now, not the way you feel right now. You close your eyes against his shoulder, spread your palms out instead of digging your nails into his back. 

You can't help the confession that finally comes out. "I could have seen her. I was in Paris during the Occupation."

"I got there in '43. I was too late, we both were. We can't change it, Lix, nothing can ever change it."

And you have to look at him, turn around and kiss his hands, tell him what you've wanted to since Teruel. Since, honestly, Seville.

"Don't let me run anymore. Don't let me leave."

He knows what you mean, the words you've never been able to say to each other.

"I won't," he says. "I don't want you to, either."

***

You don't marry him.

You'll never be "Mrs. Brown", never wear a ring on your finger or stand before a priest. 

You do, eventually, move to Islington with him. You share a flat with a scandalously large bed, a study you spend hours arguing over who uses more bookspace in, and a sitting room decorated with the photos you took in the months after that June night in 1958. He'd made you pick up your camera again, begin documenting mundane, everyday beauty instead of the terror of war zones.

It hurts, at first, being around each other. It hurts to have Hector and Marnie's daughter in the studio, take her on outings to the park. It'll hurt later when Bel and Freddie's children (they marry in '59, when Freddie can walk without the cane and the scars begin to fade) play tag in your dining room and hide in your pantry. It hurts, but not as much as it would hurt to be apart from him.

You love him, even when he's infuriating; a June afternoon when he lures you to tea at a cafe, your mother, Auntie Dee, Trudy, and Bebe waiting for you.

("I will kill you in your sleep," you promise him, and he laughs, kisses you.

"Of course you will," he says in return, and commences charming your mother and Auntie Dee.)

You stay, of course. You promised him. You stay during his bad days, which aren't as bad as Spain, so that's a blessing. He'll always fold his clothes obsessively, want to organize the entire flat, and you'll probably always drink too much and pick fights with him, but you're both learning to cope. You don't regret it for a second during the good days.

As it turns out, you die in London, eight years after Randall. Those years are full of your family - Freddie and Bel and the children, Hector and Marnie and little Alice, Mama and Auntie Dee and Trudy and Bebe - and you did have twenty more years with Randall.

Existence isn't lonely anymore.

**Author's Note:**

>  _altro cerveza por favor_ \- another beer, please  
>  _hola, como estas?_ \- hello, how are you?  
>  _fotographos_ \- photojournalists  
>  _militianos/militianas_ \- militia volunteers  
>  _Confederacion Nacionale del Trabajo_ \- [CNT labor unions](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederaci%C3%B3n_Nacional_del_Trabajo#The_Civil_War)  
>  _OBRER! CAMPEROL! UNITAT PER LA VICTORIA!_ \- "Workers! Peasants! Unite for Victory!" (CNT slogan)  
>  _basta! quien es?_ \- stop! who's there?  
>  _soy un periodista. no te lastimaré_ \- I'm a journalist. I won't hurt you.  
>  _ingles? frances? ruso?_ \- English? French? Russian?  
>  _loyales_ \- Republican forces  
>  _nacionales/Franquistas_ \- Nationalist/Franco forces  
>  _patissiere_ \- baker


End file.
